1. The Field of the Invention
This invention relates to software and computer systems and, more particularly, to novel systems and methods for design modeling of fluid and energy handling systems.
2. The Background Art
The need to condition the environment in which people live has existed as long as sun, rain, and winter storms. The solutions have been many and varied, depending on the availability of shelter, fuels, cooling materials, insulation, fans, and so forth. In more recent history, refrigeration systems, heating systems, and their various combinations have taken advantage of new thermodynamic cycles and a wide variety of working fluids.
Nevertheless, much of the process of designing systems for heating, ventilating, and air conditioning (HVAC) is an iterative process of design and analysis. Moreover, a change in a parameter may affect the performance of many other parameters, or limit the applicability of other equipment, configurations, or analyses. Also, the methods used for design and analysis will often require considerable familiarity with both engineering principles and available manufactured equipment. Much of the design process is beyond the intuitive sense of an individual. Documentation is likewise esoteric and non-intuitive.
What is needed is a system for rapidly designing, analyzing, and redesigning HVAC systems. It would be an advancement in the art to rely on an object oriented programming system and intuitive, visual icons. It would be a further advance in the art to provide automatic calculation of interface information, thus keeping the specifications and performance parameters consistent among associated components.
There are many stages involved in the design and implementation of an HVAC system. The first stage is to design a building that an HVAC system will serve. A loads program is used to calculate airflow and heating requirements for the building, based on established codes. An HVAC system must then be designed, using available components. A control system must be designed to control the HVAC system. And finally, all the components of the system must be purchased and installed. This process requires that each step use the output of a previous step. Often, the data used by one step must be manually extracted from the output data of a preceding step. The extracted data may then need to be manually converted to a computer readable form.
What is needed is a system capable of integrating the many steps of the design process, enabling each step to automatically extract needed information from the preceding step. Such a system would enable for information to be entered into a computer once, rather than at each stage of the design process.